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Handrejka

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Posts posted by Handrejka

  2. Posted

    Friday, February 18, 2005 Posted: 10:08 AM EST (1508 GMT)

     

    MARINA DEL REY, California (AP) -- Samuel W. Alderson, the inventor of

    crash test dummies that are used to make cars, parachutes and other

    devices safer, has died. He was 90.

     

    Alderson died February 11 at home of complications from myelofibrosis,

    a bone marrow disorder, his son Jeremy said.

     

    He grew up tinkering in his father's custom sheet-metal shop, worked

    on various military technology and by 1952 had formed Alderson

    Research Labs.

     

    The company made anthropomorphic dummies for use by the military and

    NASA in testing ejection seats and parachutes. The dummies were built

    to approximate the weight and density of humans and hold

    data-gathering instruments.

     

    One type of dummy he developed measured radiation doses.

     

    There was little interest in his first automobile test dummy, he once

    said, until publication of Ralph Nader's consumer protection book

    "Unsafe at Any Speed" in 1965. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle

    Safety Act was passed a year later.

     

    Before creating dummies, he worked on missile guidance systems and

    helped develop a coating to enhance vision on submarine periscopes

    during World War II.

     

    He left his original company in 1973 to form a competing crash test

    dummy maker, and the two companies were dominant in the market until

    eventually merging in 1990 to form First Technology Safety Systems.

     

    In addition to son Jeremy, he is survived by another son, a sister and

    four grandchildren.

  4. Posted

    Anyway.... tell me someone how I can get some cash - approx. £2000 immediately. All avenues e.g. credit cards, loans etc are exhausted and I need about £2000 to get self back on the straight on narrow.

    Moving to Wales has managed to get me into a situation that I could never have predicted (& I feel I've been set up) & I need to get away from here & fast.

    Tried the lottery, can't increase my credit card limits, cannot extend my loan until 2nd April, family and friends cannot come up with that kind of wedge and I'd also have to explain to them what was going on ... so ideas please.

    And fast if you wouldn't mind. Thank you.

     

    P.s. I am being rational re: previous message.... just things have got bad.

     

     

    Prostitution?

  10. Posted

    There are some people I have in other dead pools that I've not included in DDP

    Svetlana Stalin (should have choosen her would have been a unique pick), Deborah Kerr, Sandra Dee, Diego Marradona and other I just forgot, Mike Yarwood, Gunther Grass, John Mortimer, Ted Heath , Ian Paisley, Gerald Ford, Nany Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Ian Brady

     

    Still there's always next year.

  17. Posted

    Already has. Probably not famous enough though

     

    TORONTO (CP) -- He was the smarmy Dean Wormer in the sophomoric cult

    movie Animal House.

     

    He was a bad guy who got tossed out a window to his death by the even

    badder Lee Marvin in Point Blank. But Canadians may best remember

    actor John Vernon as a crusading coroner in the groundbreaking 1960s

    CBC crime series Wojeck.

     

    Vernon, 72, died peacefully at his Los Angeles home Tuesday, his

    family said.

     

    With his pockmarked face and heavy-lidded blue eyes, Vernon proved to

    be the ideal villain in dozens of the 85 motion pictures he made over

    a four-decade career. But he started as a hero in Wojeck in which his

    character was based on real-life Toronto coroner and politician Dr.

    Morton Shulman and which formed the template for future

    forensics-based crime series, from Quincy to Da Vinci's Inquest to CSI.

     

    "Everybody's seen my face but nobody's sure who I am," he once told an

    interviewer, revealing that he had often been mistaken for Richard

    Burton or Robert Shaw. "People confuse me with other people and I

    enjoy that."

     

    He was seen most recently on the "double secret probation" DVD edition

    of Animal House, in a feature that offered a tongue-in-cheek current

    look at the characters of the 1978 film. Vernon's Dean Wormer was a

    crotchety, snowy-haired senior in a wheelchair.

     

    Chris Haddock, creator of Da Vinci's Inquest, said at the time he was

    surprised that Vernon was still around and agreed it was a great idea

    to see if he could make a cameo appearance on the series as a sort of

    tribute.

     

    Vernon's other notable film roles included The Outlaw Josey Wales,

    Dirty Harry, Airplane II, Topaz, Brannigan, Charley Varrick, Nobody

    Waved Goodbye and Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here. He also starred in a

    short-lived ABC-TV Animal House spinoff series called Delta House and

    in a 1990 CBC movie that reprised his Wojeck character.

     

    TV guest roles included The FBI, Bonanza, Mission Impossible, The Name

    of the Game, High Chapparall, Judd for the Defence and Quincy. He also

    made a pilot for a failed U.S. series called Hunter. There were more

    than 100 roles in Canadian TV, running the gamut from Tugboat Annie to

    Cannonball to Forest Rangers.

     

    Regina-born and stage trained, the six-foot-two Vernon, whose birth

    name was Adolphus Raymondus Vernon Agopsowicz, spent five years at the

    Stratford Festival, where he met his future Wojeck co-star Ted

    Follows, Megan Follows' father.

     

    Speaking from his home in Kitchener, Ont., Follows said Thursday that

    although he and Vernon hadn't been in touch since they made the Wojeck

    movie, they had been close friends for many years. He understood

    Vernon had had heart problems and was recently released from hospital.

     

    He recalled how "way ahead of its time" Wojeck was as a prime-time

    series that dealt frankly with such issues as abortion and lesbianism.

     

    "(Vernon) was awfully good in that show . . . he really was perfect in

    that role."

     

     

     

     

     

     

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